The Business: Corporate IP Ownership Compared

I've said plenty on Corporate IP ownership, and that the quality of Corporate-owned pop culture productions depend greatly on the adherance of to a concept of stewardship. If a regime holds to it, you get good stuff. If not, you get trash. Regimes turn over, so this can happen to IPs in a cyclical format. For reasons I won't go into here, the regime that control the Gundam property have been more good than bad about being stewards of the property in the last decade and as Gundam's 40th anniversary goes on we're seeing this continue. The below is from the GundamOfficial channel on YouTube.

The style employed shows that this is by the same team that did the anime adaptation of the Gundam: Origin manga, which is a superb prequel to the original series following Char Aznable's youth from being dispossessed as a child due to his father's murder and becoming the legendary Char of the original series by the end (which concludes with the Battle of Loum and its immediate aftermath).

In the Epilogue closing out Origin, we see White Base going to Side 3 to get the original Gundam. That was the teasing of a remake of the original series. This video--and the other version focusing on Amuro--seem to be more aimed at pitching special limited-run anniversary Gunpla kits than any remake, but I bet that the reactions to both these teasers and the kits will be used to measure interest in an Origin-style anime remake.

(But any such remake won't come in 2020. That's due to the owners not wanting anything to take away from the movie releases for the anime adaptation of the light novel Hathaway's Flash, which heretofore you had to play Super Robot Wars V to get any info about it at all other than to read it (and then it's only in Japanese).)

You can get good remakes out of a Japanese corporate-owned property. The on-going remakes of the original Space Battleship Yamato series, with the second finally getting released in the U.S. this year, is proof of that. Not an exact shot-for-shot remake, but still well-received by returning fans and drawing in a new audience to compliment that loyal cohort, and that's what a Corporate-run IP is supposed to look like. The tell? Merch sales and cosplay representation are strong. The result? Good Return On Investment.

This is why I (a) fully expect the Mouse to purge the SJWs from Lucasfilm, and (b) expect that aforementioned remake of the original Gundam series to be announced formally in the coming year. The former is what the now-dominant Corporate faction at Lucasfilm sees as required to get that damage repaired and the machine functioning again, and the latter is what a competent corporate management regime looks like.

It's why I expect more Corporate backstabbing of Death Cultists in their orgs in the coming years; their goals do not coincide, and Corporate is seeing this more plainly now, and being psychopaths they'll have no qualms with being ruthless about purging them like they're Space Marines enacting Exterminatus with their bare hands. What is that saying? "Don't mess with a man's money." Yeah, that. Tends to get Corporate to call the hit squads, and real money trumps fake religion more often than not.